OPINION | Trump, Gore and the Peruvian electoral process

Editor’s note: Roberto Izurieta is director of Latin American Projects at George Washington University. He has worked in political campaigns in several Latin American countries and Spain, and was an advisor to Presidents Alejandro Toledo, of Peru; Vicente Fox, from Mexico, and Álvaro Colom, from Guatemala. Izurieta has been a close friend of Keiko Fujimori since the 1990s. The author is also a contributor to CNN en Español.

Hanna Houdali is a Peruvian communicator, expert in corporate and governmental affairs in Latin America with master’s degrees in business administration and political management.

(CNN Spanish) – What happens in Peru? How is the situation of Keiko Fujimori vs. Pedro Castillo with that of other close elections such as Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump, or Al Gore vs. George W. Bush? Faced with some misrepresented information that is circulating, many make wrong guesses easily. While waiting for an official outcome, it is worth reviewing some concepts.

Does Keiko Fujimori ask like Donald Trump for a recount of all the votes? No. In Peru, the votes are not kept, only the minutes remain where the count is. In reality, almost all of the votes were destroyed once they were counted on the day of the election.

In Peru there is the principle of “Act kills vote.” That is, after the votes are counted at each polling station, the minutes of the table are written and, if there is no observation, the votes are destroyed. Only the votes that generate doubts – a few hundred votes among more than the 18 million cast – are elevated to the next instance.

With little more than 44,000 votes difference between Pedro Castillo from Peru Libre, and Keiko Fujimori from Fuerza Popular, we are facing an election that must be exempt from any doubt, both in the process and in the final result.

Perhaps if Peru decided to safeguard the votes cast until the day a winner is proclaimed, it could save itself from being in the midst of these tensions and doubts at 802 polling stations. Those votes, which are approximately 200,000 or 1.1% of the total cast, would simply be counted.

There are close elections everywhere. When Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000, the vote difference between the two candidates – after counting – was just hundreds of votes, according to The Florida Ballots Project, a media consortium in which CNN participated. Gore accepted his defeat after the Supreme Court ordered a halt to the vote count five weeks after the election.

The Peruvian case shows a difference of only 0.23% of the votes. What one of the fronts, Fujimori, is asking for is the review and annulment of a little more than 800 minutes, something that would have to be resolved by the National Elections Jury.

The debate now focuses on the deadline that Fuerza Popular had to present those requests for the nullity of the minutes. The deadline was Wednesday after the June 6 elections. Although the electoral law indicates that the term is three days, a limit that can be interpreted as midnight on the third, a provision of the JNE itself established that, under the framework of the pandemic, the working hours for procedural actions are until 3:00 p.m. 8 PM Popular Force only managed to present just over 150 minutes until that time, according to the party’s lawyer, Julio César Castiglioni.

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The call from various sectors is that, beyond the questioned formalities, they proceed to review all requests for the nullity of electoral records submitted until midnight on that third day, and thus reduce doubts about the final result. That, we believe, is a fundamental step to give credibility and legitimacy to the next president of the nation.

Along these lines, the Lima Center 1 Special Electoral Jury (the first instance in the electoral certification process), agreed to treat all requests for annulment received that Wednesday under its jurisdiction, giving hope to the Popular Force thesis. However, it immediately decided to declare them unfounded, arguing that the nullity facts must be proven in a “reliable, incontrovertible and unobjectionable” manner, as indicated in one of its resolutions. Thus a new question arises: if something is incontrovertible and unobjectionable, why do we need a judge to decide it? In general, it would be expected, as in many other countries, that a judge or jury must decide something “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

Given these limitations to question results that generate suspicion, it seems that the only way to avoid an alleged “table fraud” (especially in places where a candidate dominates the electoral process) is through the presence of representatives, a kind of representative of each party at the voting tables. A large-scale logistical operation to cover the 86,488 polling stations in the country. This would be almost impossible in our countries, where there is party weakness, rigid limitations on both income and expenditures of electoral spending, and situations of electoral violence in territories dominated by specific forces.

How much longer could this wait last? In Gore’s case, the US Supreme Court, in a decision challenged because its justices voted according to the party of the president that nominated them, only stopped the recount on the last day a state (in this case Florida) could Send your result to the Electoral College: December 12, 2000, five weeks after the election. The votes were being counted one by one. With Florida, Bush had enough Electoral College votes to be elected President of the United States. They reached the final deadline.

A recent case worth considering to improve the Peruvian system is the model used in the state of Georgia, the first disputed outcome in this latest election between Biden and Trump. Biden had won with 0.3% of the vote. The local electoral law establishes that if the difference between the two candidates is in the order of 0.5% or less, the request for a vote count is automatically authorized. And so it was done. But Donald Trump arbitrarily asked for all votes to be counted in all states of uncertain electoral trend that Biden ended up winning.

In Ecuador, in the first round in which Yaku Pérez and Guillermo Lasso were disputed, who passed to the second round with Andrés Arauz, Pérez demanded a total count in all the provinces. Lasso, for his part, offered something more reasonable: the partial recount in the provinces where there was a “reasonable doubt”. The JNE decided on a partial recount and the process continued.

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Another example that may be useful for future electoral processes in Peru is the case of Paraguay, which just elected its candidates this Sunday in the mandatory general internal elections. He did it with machines that help him count and be able to certify the count. They did it in hours and the day was a success because there are multiple levels of trust and tracking of the count.

When an election is so close, we do not believe that the “act kills vote” system should exist and at the same time it is stipulated that the act can only be annulled when the petition is “unobjectionable”. There are elections like Gore-Bush in 2000 and many others where the result is very tight. In these cases, every possible instance must be exhausted so that citizens are reassured that their vote has been properly counted, and this requires the capacity for oversight, transparency, and an impartial counting of votes.